X-Men and Star Wars turned sci-fi into Simon Kinberg’s career — and there’s more to come
Simon Kinberg grew up in what he calls the “golden age of science fiction,” when Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, and Blade Runner weren’t cross-media IP, but banger movies you got to watch on big screens. For Kinberg, growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood Village in the late 1970s and ’80s put him in skateboarding distance of a movie theater paying Return of the Jedi on constant rotation. He found himself waiting in line with hordes of people hungry to see again and again. His people.
“Maybe the equivalent is a new season of Game of Thrones or a new season ofStranger Things, but even then you’re not having to wait with strangers out in the heat or people who have camped out to see these. And so there was a real magic to science fiction for so many of us who lived lives that are normal or mundane, that idea of entering into a hole of the universe and escaping our world.”
In his later youth, Kinberg would pick up H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov and find even more dimension to the genre that would eventually come to define a career telling stories for the types of people who lined up on day one for Return of the Jedi. When he finally wrapped up college and got his foot in the door of Hollywood in the early 2000s, Kinberg was almost immediately writing for Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer, and becoming a favorite of Doug Liman with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (later turning the director toward more straight sci-fi fare with Jumper). He was the genre ace, giving simple premises a heightened hook, often through the rewiring of sci-fi tropes. It’s no surprise that Fox eventually handed him the X-Men and Lucasfilm came calling with Star Wars.
Twenty years later, science fiction is not just a genre for
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